Taylor Alison Swift is an American singer-songwriter. An influential figure in popular culture, Swift is known for her autobiographical songwriting and artistic reinventions.
She is the highest-grossing live music artist, the wealthiest female musician, and one of the best-selling music artists of all time.
named after: James Taylor
real name: Taylor Alison Swift
labels: Big Machine Records, Republic Records
genres: pop music, country music
awards: Dick Clark Award for Excellence, MTV Video Music Award for Best Female Video, American Music Award for Favorite Country Female Artist, American Music Award for Artist of the Year, American Music Award for Favorite Pop/Rock Female Artist, American Music Award for Favorite Country Female Artist, Favorite Adult Contemporary New Artiste, American Music Award for Favorite Country Album
plays: banjo, guitar, piano, ukulele
Facts from Wikidata and Discogs, free to use.
Taylor Alison Swift was born on December 13, 1989, at Reading Hospital in West Reading, Pennsylvania. She is named after the singer-songwriter James Taylor; her parents chose a unisex name, hoping it would help her succeed in business. Her father, Scott Kingsley Swift, was a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch, and her mother, Andrea Gardner Swift (née Finlay), worked as a mutual fund marketing executive. Swift's younger brother, Austin, is an actor who manages her film projects. Taylor and Austin are of Scottish, English, and German descent, with distant Irish and Italian ancestry; they are paternal great-great-grandchildren of Charles Carmine Antonio Baldi, a prominent Philadelphia businessman. Their maternal grandmother, Marjorie Finlay (née...
Swift signed with Sony/ATV Tree Music Publishing in 2004; at 14, she became the youngest person in that publishing company's history. In Nashville, she worked with experienced Music Row songwriters, including Liz Rose. Rose and Swift would write songs every Tuesday afternoon after school. After one year on the development deal, she left RCA Records, which was planning to keep her in development until she turned 18. Swift made this decision because she wanted to release the songs immediately to ensure that they still resonated with her teenage experiences.
With continuous musical reinventions, Swift has been described as a "musical chameleon" by journalists and music analysts alike. Her discography primarily spans country, pop, and folk genres, incorporating various styles such as country pop, country rock, electropop, indie rock, pop rock, soft rock, and synth-pop, with elements of electronica, hip-hop, R&B, and rock. Swift self-identified as a country musician with her first four albums, influenced by 1990s female country artists such as Shania Twain, Faith Hill, LeAnn Rimes, and the Dixie Chicks, as well as Keith Urban's incorporation of rock, pop, and blues into country music. The albums feature a country pop sound defined by instruments such as the six-string banjo, mandolin, and...
"Safe & Sound" is a song by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift featuring the American musical duo the Civil Wars, taken from the soundtrack of The Hunger Games (2012). Swift and the Civil Wars wrote the track with its producer T Bone Burnett.
The track is an indie folk ballad with a spare arrangement evoking Americana, alternative country, and Appalachian music. The lyrics are about the Hunger Games protagonist Katniss Everdeen's empathy and compassion for other characters, even as she fights to survive in the eponymous Games.
T Bone Burnett produced The Hunger Games: Songs from District 12 and Beyond, the soundtrack to the 2012 film The Hunger Games. He recruited other artists to write and record songs for the soundtrack, including Taylor Swift and the folk duo the Civil Wars, consisting of the members Joy Williams and John Paul White. After playing a Los Angeles concert in fall 2011, the Civil Wars were invited to Burnett's house; there, they and Swift together wrote "Safe & Sound" during a two-hour session. Swift had spent two days reading the book to understand the story; the song is told from Katniss Everdeen's perspective. For Swift, who had mostly written autobiographical songs inspired by her personal life, writing from a fictional character's viewpoint...
Lionsgate, the producer of The Hunger Games, and Burnett wanted to create music that evoked "what Appalachian music would sound like in 300 years". To this end, "Safe & Sound" features a spare, folk-inspired production, congruent with the story's setting in the Appalachian region. Billboard described it as a folk ballad. The Boot said that it veered towards folk and Americana, NME's Hannah Mylrea and American Songwriter's Savannah Dantona characterized it as indie folk, and Rolling Stone's Monica Herrera found the production reminiscent of alternative country.
Upon release, "Safe and Sound" received positive reviews from critics. AllMusic's Heather Phares considered it "the most crucial" track on the Hunger Games soundtrack. Jody Rosen from Rolling Stone gave the song four out of five stars, calling it Swift's "prettiest ballad" and writing that it suggested a novelty in Swift's artistry. This idea was echoed by Jason Lipshutz from Billboard, who called the song a "non-Swiftian anthem that embraces the folksiness of the soundtrack" and McCall, who opined that "her music is getting riskier". Entertainment Weekly's Darren Franich and Spin's Marc Hogan wrote that "Safe & Sound" was a departure from the usual romantic pop songs in Swift's catalog. Franich lauded Swift and the Civil Wars for evoking...